Ce qui se passe vraiment dans les ports du sud de la Floride : horaires de gate, restrictions d'itinéraire, systèmes de rendez-vous et les frais qui courent pendant qu'un conteneur attend. Écrit depuis le travail, avec les sources.
Two days at the end of the year are firm: Christmas Day, Friday 25 December 2026, and New Year's Day, Friday 1 January 2027. Port Everglades Terminal, Florida International Terminal and POMTOC all name them in their tariffs as days with no work at all, and both fall on a Friday, so a box that does not leave on the Thursday sits until Monday. Thanksgiving, Thursday 26 November, is a holiday in every tariff but a no-work day in none of them, so whether a gate opens is a notice the terminal sends that week. And the part that costs money is not the closure. It is whether your terminal counts the holiday as one of your free days, and the three terminals that publish it answer that three different ways.
PortMiami · Port Everglades · Demurrage · Holidays · Planning
A container is worth more than the move, and the move is arranged in a phone call. Five checks cover most of what a shipper can actually find out about a trucking company before the box is in its hands: the Port's own cartage permit, federal operating authority, an insurance certificate with real limits on it, the intermodal interchange agreement that lets a carrier touch an ocean line's equipment, and the credential the driver needs to be inside the fence. None of them takes long. Each answers one narrow question, and the trouble people get into usually comes from reading one of them as an answer to all five.
A forklift that rides on the back of the trailer solves the hardest part of a jobsite delivery: there is nothing at the other end to unload with. It places freight in fifteen to thirty minutes where a hand unload takes hours, and it does it with nobody on site. And then it meets a lot that took rain two days ago, and the question stops being what the machine can lift and becomes what the ground can carry. Here is the honest version of when the machine comes off the truck, when it stays on, and what a dispatcher asks before sending one.
Every import has a paperwork half and a physical half, and the person paying for both usually only sees one of them at a time. The filings happen in systems you never log into, and then a container either moves or sits. This is the trucking side of each filing: what it is, who is allowed to do it, and what it means for the box waiting at the terminal. We handle both halves of an import: the customs clearance, filed by the licensed customs broker we work with, and the move itself. This is the second half, written by the people who move the box.
A truck arrives at a distribution centre and comes back with the freight still on it. Nothing is damaged, nothing is missing, and the paperwork is right. The pallets were built wrong for the place they were going, and nobody found out until the driver was standing at the gate. Restacking is the work that prevents that, and it is worth understanding before the load leaves rather than after it returns.
Two containers arrive the same morning, same size, same weight, same commodity. One is emptied in under an hour by one person on a forklift. The other takes a crew most of a day. Nothing on the paperwork tells you which is which before it arrives, and the difference is the single largest variable in what devanning costs. Here is how to know in advance, and what to do when the answer is the expensive one.
Devanning · Warehouse · Floor loaded · Pallets · Per diem
A shipper came to us with a machine 94 inches long, 52 wide and 98 high, weighing 5,800 pounds, and a quote for a 20ft flat rack with break bulk service. The machine would be exposed to the open sea on a flat rack, so it also needed a crate, and the crate was the part he wanted to avoid paying for. The useful question turned out not to be how to make the crate cheaper. It was whether the machine needed to travel in the open at all, because at 98 inches tall it is under the door opening of a high cube container by a few inches. Here is how to check that for your own load, what it does and does not save you, and the rules that apply either way.
Flat rack · High cube · Out of gauge · ISPM 15 · VGM · Break bulk
A 40ft container is rated to carry around 58,000 pounds of cargo, and on an American highway you will be lucky to legally truck 44,000 of it. That gap is not a technicality and it is not a rounding error. It is the single most common reason a container that loaded perfectly well overseas turns into an overweight problem the morning it lands, and the reason is simple once you see it: the rating on the box was written for a ship, and a ship does not care what your tractor weighs.
Weight · ISO 668 · Payload · Overweight · Drayage · Bridge formula
There are two ways to get a container unloaded, and they fail in different ways. A live unload means the driver waits while you empty the box, which is fine if you are quick and expensive if you are not, because past the free window that waiting becomes detention. Drop and pick means the container is left with you and collected later, which removes the waiting entirely but needs somewhere to put a 40 foot box and adds a second trip. Which one is right is decided by your yard and your labour, not by preference.
Detention · Drop and pick · Live unload · Receiving · Yard
Two carriers quote the same container and the numbers differ by a third. That usually is not one of them being cheap; it is the two quotes containing different things. A drayage price is a distance-driven base plus a set of accessorials that may or may not have been mentioned, and the ones that get left out are predictable: the chassis, the pre-pull, the waiting time and the fuel. Here is what sits inside the number, so you can ask two carriers the same question and get answers you can actually compare.
A refrigerated container is a machine, and a machine needs power. Inside the terminal it is plugged in. On the road it is not, so it runs on a genset, and whether one is arranged is the difference between a delivery and a claim. Reefers also carry less than a dry box of the same outside size, because the insulation and the machinery take real space, and they accrue the same per diem as any other container while the empty waits to go back.
Reefer · Genset · Cold chain · Per diem · Perishables
Most freight writing about Miami describes two big container ports and stops. That misses how a large share of Caribbean and Latin American cargo actually arrives: through Seaboard Marine, which runs its own terminal inside the Port of Miami, and through the Miami River, a working port that belongs to none of the three seaports and moves cargo on far smaller vessels. Most freight writing about Miami never mentions either name, which tells you how much of this market is served by people who do not write about it.
Seaboard Marine · Antillean Marine · Miami River · Caribbean · Latin America
Importers assume the delay is finding a truck. In South Florida it is far more often finding a slot. The container terminals run on appointment systems: a specific window on a specific day, released in batches, and taken quickly for the mornings everybody wants. A fully released container with no appointment is not a container you can collect today, and the gap between those two states is where a quiet day of demurrage lives.
When freight will not go in a box, the question becomes which deck it rides on, and the answer is decided almost entirely by height. Every step down this list buys legal cargo height and costs something in flexibility or money. A flatbed is the default; a step deck buys roughly 18 inches; a double drop puts the freight in a well between the axles; a lowboy goes lower still; and an RGN does what none of the others do, which is let the machine drive itself on.
A 45ft container is not just a longer 40. There is no standard-height 45: they are all high cubes, which is what the 5 in the ISO code L5G1 means. They need a 45ft or extendible chassis, which is precisely why some carriers decline them without saying so. And on the South Florida trades a lot of them are 102 inch wide bodies, which is seven inches wider inside than an ISO box, and those seven inches decide whether two 48 inch pallets fit side by side.
Plenty of businesses import without owning a building that a truck can back into. They rent a unit, work out of a shop, or sell online, and then a 40ft container arrives and there is nowhere for it to go. The answer is not storage, which is a room you rent. It is somebody receiving freight under your name, checking it in, holding it, and shipping it back out as you sell it. It is rarely offered by name, even though a great many importers need exactly it.
Shipping and receiving · Warehouse · Dock · Transload · Miami
South Florida is not one port. Containers from Latin America and the Caribbean land at the Port of Miami, at Port Everglades, at the Port of Palm Beach, and on the Miami River, and within each of those the box sits at one specific terminal with its own gate, its own appointment system and its own tariff. Knowing which one before you ask for a rate is the difference between a price and a conversation, because the terminal decides the distance, the appointment and half the accessorials.
PortMiami · Port Everglades · Palm Beach · Miami River · Terminals
The short move between a port and a warehouse has one name in the American trade, drayage, and no single name in Spanish. Importers say acarreo, transporte de contenedores, transporte terrestre, or just el camión, and which one they use depends on where they learned the business. That matters in Miami more than anywhere, because the buyer and the seller of this service frequently do not use the same word for it, and a quote request that uses the wrong one gets routed to the wrong desk.
A container does not leave a terminal because somebody asked for it. Four things have to be true first: the shipping line has released it, customs has released it, nothing is owed to the terminal, and there is an appointment. Miss any one and the truck cannot collect, while the demurrage clock runs regardless of whose fault it is. Here is the whole sequence in the order it actually happens, so you can see where yours is stuck.
A container can be legal on paper and illegal on the road. Florida caps gross combination weight at 80,000 pounds and a single axle at 20,000 pounds, and those are two separate tests: a load can pass the first and fail the second purely because of how the weight sits. Past those limits you need a permit from the state, the right chassis under the box, and awareness that the ports carry their own limits on top of the state's. Running without the permit is priced at five cents per pound over.
A TWIC is the federal credential that lets a person into the secure areas of a port without an escort. It is issued by the TSA, it is valid for five years, and every driver working the South Florida terminals needs one. It is also routinely confused with things it is not: it is not a hazmat endorsement, it is not a permit, and it does not release your container. It answers exactly one question, which is whether this person may be inside the fence unescorted.
A pre-pull means collecting the container from the terminal before you are ready for it, and holding it on a yard until you are. It exists for one reason: demurrage stops when the box leaves the terminal. The question is never whether a pre-pull is good, it is whether terminal storage for the days you need costs more than yard storage for the same days plus the extra move. Usually it does. Sometimes it does not, and knowing which is which is the whole skill.
Pre-pull · Demurrage · Storage · Per diem · Decisions
A container cannot move on its own. It rides on a chassis, which is a wheeled frame owned by somebody who is usually neither you, nor the terminal, nor the trucker. When the chassis is not where the container is, the truck has to go and get one first, and that extra trip is a chassis split. It is the most common surprise line on a drayage invoice, and the one least often explained before it arrives.
Free time is the number of days your container may sit inside the terminal before storage charges begin, and the last free day is the last of them. Two things surprise people. The number is not universal: the terminal sets its own and the shipping line may allow its own, and they are not the same allowance. And the day is not a cliff you fall off, it is a meter switching on, so being one day late is a cost rather than a catastrophe, and being five days late is five times that cost.
Last free day · Demurrage · Free time · PortMiami · Terminals
They get used as if they were synonyms, and they are not. Demurrage is the marine terminal charging you because the cargo is still inside its gate. Per diem is the ocean carrier charging you because its container is still out in the world. Detention is time, usually a driver waiting at a dock. Different party, different trigger, different way to stop it. The reason it matters is that they overlap: a container can be accruing two of them at once, and the action that stops one does nothing to the other.
Three different companies usually touch an import, and they are not interchangeable. The customs broker classifies your goods, files the entry with CBP, and handles duties and holds; the freight forwarder books the international move and coordinates the legs; the carrier physically moves the freight through the terminals and the warehouse. For commercial imports you effectively always need a broker in practice, because formal entries require a customs bond and expertise most importers do not carry in-house, and under 19 USC 1641 filing entries for others is licensed customs business. Most of the work on this site arrives through brokers and forwarders, and if you do not have a broker yet, we handle customs clearance too, filed by the licensed customs broker we work with: get in touch.
For IEEPA tariff refunds, contingency shops typically charge 15 to 25 percent of the refund, while customs brokers commonly charge a flat 500 to 2,000 dollars per CAPE declaration or 5 to 15 percent, and a single declaration can hold up to 9,999 entries. For a simple claim, the work is largely assembling a spreadsheet of entry numbers, so a large contingency cut is often paying for convenience, not complexity. Duty drawback firms run on contingency too, and above roughly 50,000 to 100,000 dollars a year in recoverable duty, retainer or capped pricing usually beats it. One protection is built in: the refund always pays the importer of record, and no filer can redirect it to themselves. The broker who already filed your entries is a fair first quote, and we handle refunds too, with the licensed customs broker we work with: get in touch. One rule sits underneath all of it: filing refunds is customs business under 19 USC 1641 that requires a licensed broker, whoever you hire.
There are 178 Section 301 exclusions active right now, 164 product-specific ones plus 14 covering solar manufacturing equipment, and after the November 2025 US-China deal they run into November 2026. Because the extensions never lapsed, there is no new retroactive reinstatement window to file against. The real money is narrower: if you imported goods that qualified for an active exclusion but your entries did not claim it, you can recover those duties through a post-summary correction before liquidation, or a protest within 180 days after liquidation. We handle that recovery with the licensed customs broker we work with: get in touch if you think it applies to you.
If you overpaid duty or filed a customs entry with a mistake, there are exactly two administrative ways to fix it, and they live on opposite sides of one event called liquidation. Before CBP liquidates the entry, your broker files a Post Summary Correction (PSC) in ACE, available up to 300 days after entry and no later than 15 days before scheduled liquidation. After liquidation, your only tool is a protest under 19 USC 1514, and the deadline is 180 days from the date of liquidation, a hard jurisdictional line that no one can extend. Miss both windows and you are into litigation territory, which for most entries means the money is gone. We handle both with the licensed customs broker we work with, since filing PSCs and protests is licensed customs business (19 USC 1641), and knowing these two windows is how you avoid needing the bad third option.
customs protest · post summary correction · liquidation · CBP Form 19 · refunds
Duty drawback is a federal refund program under 19 USC 1313 that returns 99% of the duties, taxes, and fees you paid on imported goods that are later exported or destroyed. You can look back five years from the date of importation, which means a first-time claim can recover duty you paid as far back as 2021. Miami is the re-export gateway to Latin America and the Caribbean, so an unusual share of the importers we move freight for later export the same merchandise, and many are sitting on real money. We handle drawback for them, with the claim itself going through the licensed customs broker we work with. If the duty at stake is meaningful, roughly $50,000 a year or more, it is almost always worth a conversation: get in touch.
Some import charges can come back to you and some never will, and the line between them is whether the money went to the government or to a business. Duties paid to CBP have real refund mechanisms: IEEPA tariffs come back through the CAPE process after the Supreme Court struck them down, overpaid duties can be corrected with a post summary correction within 300 days of entry and at least 15 days before liquidation, a protest under 19 USC 1514 can challenge a liquidation within 180 days, drawback returns 99 percent of duties on goods later exported or destroyed within 5 years, and missed Section 301 exclusions can be claimed through a PSC or protest. Commercial charges are the opposite: demurrage, per diem, detention, exam costs including CES handling and exam drayage, chassis fees, and storage are money paid to terminals, ocean carriers, and service providers, and they are essentially never refundable. That is why the game on those charges is prevention, not recovery. We handle both sides: duty refunds, which are licensed customs business under 19 USC 1641, are taken care of with the licensed customs broker we work with, and the freight side is where we do the prevention.
If your company imported goods under the IEEPA tariffs, the April 2025 reciprocal tariffs or the fentanyl and trafficking tariffs, you are likely owed a refund with interest. The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on February 20, 2026 in Learning Resources v. Trump, consolidated with V.O.S. Selections, that IEEPA does not authorize tariffs, and CBP stopped collecting them on February 24, 2026. Refunds flow through CAPE, the Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries system inside the ACE portal, and only the importer of record or the licensed customs broker who filed the original entries can file a CAPE declaration. Individual consumers cannot claim anything, because the refund goes to whoever paid the duty at the border, not to shoppers who paid higher prices. We handle tariff refunds: filing is customs business under 19 USC 1641, so we take care of it with the licensed customs broker we work with, and all you need to do is get in touch. Payouts have been running about 60 to 90 days from acceptance, and as of July 10, 2026 CBP had accepted roughly $121.75 billion in claims and repaid about $86.3 billion including interest.
Chaque transporteur du pays déclare au gouvernement fédéral sa flotte, ses conducteurs et ses types de fret, et le fichier entier est public. Nous l'avons consulté pour la Floride. Il y a 2 872 transporteurs actifs enregistrés pour le fret intermodal dans cet État, le transporteur type possède exactement un camion, et moins d'une vraie flotte sur cinq a déjà reçu une cote de sécurité. Voici les chiffres tels qu'ils sont, les cinquante plus grandes flottes actives, et comment vérifier vous-même n'importe quel transporteur en deux minutes.
Le tunnel est la voie rapide pour entrer et sortir de PortMiami, et beaucoup de chargements n'ont pas le droit de l'emprunter. Les limites sont de 15 pieds de hauteur et 8 pieds 6 pouces de largeur, et les matières dangereuses munies de plaques sont interdites purement et simplement. Tout ce qui dépasse l'une de ces limites repart par l'ancien chemin : le pont de Port Boulevard, la traversée de Biscayne Boulevard et le centre-ville de Miami. Ce n'est pas un problème quand on le sait à l'avance. C'est un après-midi gâché quand on l'apprend à l'entrée du tunnel.
Operational writing from the yard: how a container actually leaves a South Florida port, what the terminal clocks charge and when, which line lands at which terminal, what a customs broker files and what each filing does to the truck, and what the road does to a container's weight. Each one answers a question a shipper asked, with the regulation or the tariff it comes from named.
Where do the facts in them come from?
From the source named at the bottom of each guide: the terminal tariffs, 49 CFR, CBP's own notices, the FMCSA federal record for the carrier counts, and the ports' published schedules. Where a figure is estimated rather than published, the guide says so and gives the method. Dates on the guides are real, and a guide whose facts have moved is updated rather than left standing.
Can I ask a question that is not answered here?
Yes. Send it with the container number or the lane it is about and it gets a straight answer in writing, and if it is a question other shippers ask, it becomes the next guide.
Société de Floride P20000054725En activité depuis 2020Réseau de plus de 350 camionsChâssis plus de 800Entrepôt plus de 50 quais de chargement